INTENT
Welcome to Brierley Hill Primary School, where our children are budding SCIENTISTS!
Our primary intention is to provide each child with a comprehensive and well-rounded Science curriculum that empowers them to confidently explore and discover the wonders around them, fostering a profound understanding of the world we inhabit.
We aspire to cultivate a genuine love for science within our students, instilling in them limitless ambitions. We hope they grow up aspiring to become astronauts, forensic scientists, toxicologists, or microbiologists.
To realise these ambitions, our approach involves exciting, hands-on experiences that fuel curiosity and encourage questioning. Our goal is for these stimulating and challenging encounters to help each child firmly grasp and expand their scientific knowledge and vocabulary while nurturing a passion and eagerness for learning.
We want our children to not only learn from their science lessons at Brierley Hill but also to fondly cherish those memories and eagerly embrace the scientific opportunities that come their way!
At Brierley Hill, we follow the CUSP science methodology. Through this approach, pupils progressively become more adept as they navigate the curriculum, accumulating, connecting, and making sense of the rich substantive and disciplinary knowledge.
Substantive knowledge encompasses subject knowledge and explicit vocabulary used to delve into the content. Common misconceptions are explicitly addressed as non-examples and positioned against known and accurate content. In CUSP science, an extensive and interconnected knowledge base is constructed to enable students to use these foundations and integrate them with existing knowledge. Misconceptions are carefully challenged within the context of substantive and disciplinary knowledge. In CUSP Science, introducing misconceptions too early is discouraged, as students need to construct a mental model to position new knowledge effectively.
Disciplinary knowledge involves understanding how to collect, use, interpret, comprehend, and evaluate evidence from scientific processes. This aspect is explicitly taught.
Scientific analysis is honed through the IPROF criteria, which we refer to as 'Thinking Scientifically.' This involves:
Identifying and classifying
Pattern seeking
Research
Observing over time
Fair and comparative testing